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Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

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Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#91

Post by lotsofpulp »

belter wrote: post #88
lotsofpulp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you expect your retirement savings to earn a minimum of x% per year? What is that x%?

I expect a company to turn and stay profitable, by doing their core business, prioritizing product quality, customer service and sustainable development. Not to end up as an over leveraged financial construct riding on extracting more and more of their customers. Optimize the business quality not the shareholders returns.

Would you (or do you) invest in that company over a different one whose share prices appreciate by a greater amount?

Would you accept less compensation if your employer cannot keep up with competitors?

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#92

Post by gizmo »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #86
gizmo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve seen pre-revenue companies that promised flying cars and other obvious scams go public via SPACs. If you don’t consider that SPAC abuse your bar is a lot lower than mine. These are companies that had no chance of surviving the more serious road show due diligence that the likes of GS demand when they take startups public. Instead we saw popular podcasts push their SPACs on gullible retail investors, based on fu…

Index ETFs have been around for 15+ years now, and the advice is widely known that if you are an uneducated investor without inside information or some type of edge, you should stick to sub 0.15% expense ratio index funds. It is so easy nowadays that all you have to do is figure out the year you want to retire and buy that year’s target date fund and forget about it. If people want to gamble, then that is their probl…

I'm not sure what your argument is. Sophisticated investors don't invest in obvious scams. That's tautologically true. Does that mean we should just watch and do nothing while people get scammed?

The thing is, nobody is born sophisticated and there are many ways to get hurt in financial markets in the absence of scams even if you're intelligent and do your homework.

You mention index trackers, but they are no silver bullet. Their mechanism is basically to buy more of stocks that go up, and to sell those stocks that stumble badly. The more people rely on index trackers (exchange traded or not) the more volatile they'll become, and because index funds use such a simple trading strategy it's easy to front-run or otherwise exploit them. Furthermore, index trackers depend on active investors for price discovery, and the fewer active investors you have the worse index funds will perform. Relying on a vanguard ETF might continue to work, but to assume that it will is hopelessly naïve. It's no coincidence that ETFs got so popular with interest rates at 0 and a fed that made stonks go up.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#93

Post by belter »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #91
belter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect a company to turn and stay profitable, by doing their core business, prioritizing product quality, customer service and sustainable development. Not to end up as an over leveraged financial construct riding on extracting more and more of their customers. Optimize the business quality not the shareholders returns.

Would you (or do you) invest in that company over a different one whose share prices appreciate by a greater amount? Would you accept less compensation if your employer cannot keep up with competitors?

I comment on the decisions of the company management/ownership, not on the investment criteria of users of the stock market.

Yubico is free to do what they want with their business model. As an existing Yubico customer, I will be taking my business somewhere else, if they deviate from my priorities. They had a nice thing going on, and I am suggesting they consider their next steps. I know I will now keep them under increased scrutiny.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#94

Post by belter »

red_admiral wrote: post #65
hayst4ck wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this as well. Capitalist influence creates a powerful conflict of interest. When it cuts down to it, which master will yubico serve? The customers or their shareholders? Now Yubico has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. I frankly can't think of very many companies that are able to resist this core capitalist corruption. Even Costco is implementing shareholder over customer policies. 1Passw…

This is not a matter of going public, but I note that when MS bought Github, there was a lot of concern over whether that would degrade the service's customer-friendliness. So far, that doesn't seem to have happened? You don't need a MS365 identity to set up a github account, for example. Also not going public, but Fastmail was bought by Opera in 2009 I think but then bought themselves back out again, and they've con…

"Has GitHub Been Down More Since Its Acquisition by Microsoft?" - https://statusgator.com/blog/has-github-been-down-more-since...

"...What does the data tell us? In the two years since the acquisition announcement, GitHub has reported a 41% increase in status page incidents. Furthermore, there has been a 97% increase in incident minutes, compared to the two years prior to the announcement..."

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#95

Post by nly »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #91
belter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect a company to turn and stay profitable, by doing their core business, prioritizing product quality, customer service and sustainable development. Not to end up as an over leveraged financial construct riding on extracting more and more of their customers. Optimize the business quality not the shareholders returns.

Would you (or do you) invest in that company over a different one whose share prices appreciate by a greater amount? Would you accept less compensation if your employer cannot keep up with competitors?

This is a strange argument. A profitable company that isn't growing (selling more stuff, hiring more people, etc) can have a stable (low) P/E and still pay a nice dividend.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#96

Post by ckdarby »

red_admiral wrote: post #70
snorremd wrote: post #26

I really hope this does not affect their current mode of operation. The reason I bought my Yubikeys in the first place were the one off purchase cost and the promise that the keys would do their job without me having to interact with Yubico from that point onwards. This has worked great so far! Now with shareholders in the mix I fear they will try to find recurring income models to increase profits. I guess we'll jus…

How would that model work considering the key is a piece of hardware, built to implement an open standard (at least for the U2F mode)? There's no "key phone home" phase in U2F. Also, though I would miss yubikeys if they went under like this, in practice I could switch to google titan or something else and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Cross key syncing service.

You plug both yubikeys in. Authenticate on both keys using the tool and then you're able to transfer/backup.

Corporate management offerings around Yubikeys, inventories, call back home to renew an expiry if the yubikey itself when touched should give out the information.

Trust me, if Yubikey hires me and goes IPO it is all downhill but the company will make a boatload more money.

Every company I have worked for I've found significant ways of increasing margins and EBITDA.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#97

Post by frunns »

echelon wrote: post #62
everdrive wrote: post #61

Honestly, do any companies improve in the long term when going public? It seems like the business model is always to make short term profits and then slowly (or in some cases quickly) die about.

Lots of companies found greater success post-IPO. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft (especially recently), Nintendo, Tesla, etc. The IPO is a statement to investors that the company believes it will grow bigger and seeks public market funds to accelerate growth. That doesn't always happen. Some companies and investors see the IPO as merely a liquidity event, which is the wrong perspective to take. SPACs were clearly…

Facebook is my main argument why IPOs suck. Facebook used to be a decent platform, post-IPO it's awful. Might be unrelated to the IPO, might not. But yeah, financially it might be "better", as they're more heavily exploiting their users' attention.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#98

Post by simplotek »

pavlov wrote: post #14
dumpster_fire wrote: post #7

I have an irrational concern about using security products from a company post-merger or acquisition. It has never ended well for me as an anecdotal user. Going public is taking that worry even further. Make keys, sell keys. The end. What's there to raise funding for? Build yet another password vault?

This is not really a merger because the other company is a “blank check” holding company (a.k.a. SPAC). It has no operations, it just holds a bunch of money put in by investors who want to find a private company that wants to go public.

> This is not really a merger because the other company is a “blank check” holding company (a.k.a. SPAC).

This reads like a non sequitur. The corporate structure is irrelevant if there is a radical change affecting how strategic decisions are made regarding their products and their userbase.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#99

Post by INTPenis »

panny wrote: post #46
INTPenis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today there are more trustworthy alternatives. Yubikey is great for a very limited set of uses. But it lacks programmability and openness. Something tillitis key has. Tkey has a steeper learning curve because they're programmable, but they're also 100% open source software and hardware.

>But it lacks programmability For a lot of us, that's a feature, not a bug.

Sure, I mean there will always be two main groups of clients on the market. Those who trust in openness and those who don't care, or even distrust it. So there will always be a place for Yubikey.

But afaik there is nothing else out there right now like the tillitis key, programmable, 100% open, and already shipping.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#100

Post by lotsofpulp »

nly wrote: post #95
lotsofpulp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you (or do you) invest in that company over a different one whose share prices appreciate by a greater amount? Would you accept less compensation if your employer cannot keep up with competitors?

This is a strange argument. A profitable company that isn't growing (selling more stuff, hiring more people, etc) can have a stable (low) P/E and still pay a nice dividend.

The point is that when you go to invest your money for your retirement, you are going to pick whichever business’s shares give you the highest ROI.

You, as a shareholder, are not optimizing for

> keep your customers happy, get your money, enjoy your life...

So why would you expect businesses to behave in a way other than maximizing ROI?

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